A lost feeling, stares-that-are-stairs

Stares-that-are-stairs are made of felt on wood. In 1993, they sat on stage between the audience and solo and duet dance work by Shelley Lasica and Sandra Parker in Temporal at Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne. 

A lost feeling, in adopting the past participle of the word feeling—felt—is also made of felt on wood. As a space holder, it sits on the border between the stares/stairs and the room into which they lead: the dance work on stage. 

The artwork begins on the back of the A4 performance program as a floor plan that measures the dance stage as 228.3 shifts wide and 17.5 moments long. A legend accompanies the plan in which 12 shifts = one meaning, and 3 meanings = one moment. They echo an imperial not a metric scale (12 inches in a foot, three feet in a yard). 

The echo recognises forbearers in the 1960s Minimal art and, in this instance and more specifically, Mel Bochner’s Measurement Room — an artwork in which measurements of a room measure the room. By measuring a room’s wall surfaces and then drawing those measurements onto the wall surfaces they measure, Measurement Room creates a visual tautology. 

Opening this tautology up by treating the work’s measurements of a room as a representation of the room; then, instead of the representation being figurative as, say, a painting of the room on canvas, the representation is the actual room. If Mel Bochner had instead represented the room as a painting, he could have walked out the door to hang it some distance away in another room. Instead, there is no distance between the representation of the room and the room. If we take representation to be an aspect of subjectivity, then, in this instance, subjectivity isn’t taking place internally as separate from the world outside us, but externally without separation from that objective world.

Measurement Room makes explicit what is implicit in Minimal art. Stares-that-are-stairs take it a step further. As such, A Lost Feeling measures a dancer’s stage in a movement’s shifts that combine to create meaning and accrue as moments. 

Mel Bochner, though, was lucky. He was the middleman between, say, Donald Judd and today who could walk away without the full scope of external subjectivity coming into view. For if subjectivity is external and not only internal to us, does it mean physical space is rife with fairies, goblins and spirits elbowing a plethora of hauntings at every street corner? Or obversely, but just as equally, if art’s representational space is now real space, do social and political occurrences automatically assume art’s content to make art akin to social studies? 

A sculptural situation takes up neither of these two positions. Its enchantment of physical space recognises the exteriority of space has no content other than its own formation — which is captivating and extraordinary in itself. A sculptuation therefore endeavours to provide some measure to this formation to give space a substantial presence equal to a material thing. 

In this way, I began working with stares-that-are-stairs over thirty years ago.

Gail Hastings
February 2024